Navigating Estrangement Situations | Being Well Podcast

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast this is where we explore the practical science of lasting well-being and if you've listened to before welcome back we're fortunate to have very engaged listeners and we get a lot of emails containing questions most of those are probably what you'd expect questions about how to improve a meaningful relationship build a particular inner strength or overcome some common psychological challenge like anxiety or depression but one group of questions that's come up more frequently than i expected has to do with familial estrangement this occurs when one member of a family distances themselves from the others or chooses to not interact with them at all research conducted in 2020 suggests that roughly a quarter of americans are estranged from a relative it's an extremely challenging and perhaps surprisingly common situation and the pain related to it only intensifies around the holidays when people are swamped with family-centric messages even if this isn't something that you're dealing with personally the questions that we engage in this territory get to broader questions having to do with balancing our own boundaries with the responsibilities we have toward other people that's what we're going to be talking about today how we can think about and navigate estrangement situations including the balance between finding the distance we need and honoring our commitments to others to help me do that i'm joined as usual by dr rick hansen rick is a clinical psychologist a best-selling author and maybe particularly important for today's conversation he's my dad so dad how are you doing today i'm good and in addition to being a father i'm uh also a son a brother and a relative so i've looked at and had some sense of estrangements of different kinds in the broader family system including people i've known about and then of course i've worked with a lot of people in this territory it's extremely poignant and maybe it's a bit of a literary way to nod to the one in four of adults statistic in america thinking about most literature including shakespeare it's about one kind of messed up family or another including estrangements and so and then we have on television now one of the top shows succession which is about situations where if there weren't money involved they would all have nothing to do with each other yeah absolutely no that's that's a great summary of the territory i think to kind of start out with before we get into it today i want to give a couple of very quick reminders to people the first is that if you'd like to support the podcast you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for just a couple dollars a month you can support the show also if you've been enjoying the show for a while and you haven't subscribed yet please do and you can maybe even tell a friend about it it's one of the best ways we have to reach new people so i think that it would kind of make sense to talk a little bit about what we're going to be talking about here today and particularly what we mean by estrangement and maybe some of the different kinds of situations that are out there we're going to be mostly focusing this episode on the dynamic between parents and children that's because that's the question that we get most frequently i'm a mother and my child won't interact with me what can i do or i'm a child and i'm trying to get some distance from my parents but i feel really bad about it in a variety of different ways what can i do and then inside of that so you can see this kind of like two by two matrix to steal of rick ism i'm creating my two by two so i get my four point list the whole thing you've got kind of parent distancing from child or child distancing from parent and then maybe you have this other matrix that we could kind of think about circumstances where there is what one might call clear harm although defining that gets a little tricky and then situations where that clear harm isn't as obviously present does that more or less track for you dad yeah it gets of course really difficult to talk about nuances of harm ranging from you know zero and a hundred they're pretty clear but what about somewhere between one and ninety nine especially in the messy middle so yeah i think that's a very good framework and even though we're going to focus on parents and kids i just want to send a nod out to issues between adult siblings which are startlingly common and they often come to the surface after one or both parents pass away so just i want to nod in that direction i also want to nod in the direction of naming the ways in which sort of bystanders within larger family systems can also be very very affected if child a you know cuts off a parent you know a parent a mother let's say and yet there are other children from that same mother that cut off from child a can really affect adult child b and c and even affect their kids and their relationships with the children of adult child a who cut off contact with the mother so there are you know complications here and complexities that we're going to just not be able to get into but i want to bow to them and name them along the way yeah and part of what you're alluding to there i think is that one of the reasons that we haven't explored this to this point in the podcast is that it's so profoundly individual and because of the profoundly individual nature of it it's kind of challenging to give really great well-applied general advice because every situation is going to be so different so we can talk about a lot of general principles here and we can maybe offer ways to think about and feel about this inside of yourself and offer advice for some more common situations and that's kind of the best we can do i think that's right uh maybe also to preview two themes that we're going to be exploring again and again often implicitly if you think about relationships or these two fundamental dynamics of joining and distancing stepping in and stepping back even over the course of a one-minute interaction you can observe subtleties of this and you can also see that some people are more predisposed by temperament toward one or the other like i tend to be a warm-hearted introvert so you know i'm very attentive to my boundaries and my own autonomy and i don't like you know influences coming at me that are dominating other people um let's say put more of a value on relationship experiences they're more invested in them they're more focused on joining so we're going to be talking about in effect how do we balance those dynamics including when they're differences of desire when for example there are people who want to join with you but you want to keep your distance from them are there other people who've really distanced from you and it's breaking your heart but you don't know how to repair there and maybe repair is impossible so what you're left with is how can you practice with this inside yourself so we're going to be getting into it here great setup we're going to kind of build this episode around two extremely common kinds of situations that people ask us about and we're going to use those two situations as a way to talk about both general principles and the ways in which you can practice inside of yourself inside of your own mind with the kind of pains associated with these situations that rick was just talking about a lot of this has to do with how to think about and interact with different forms of forgiveness that's going to be a major theme throughout the episode but i would like to start with one kind of situation we actually got this question from a listener just a few days ago as we were setting up doing this episode and i just thought that it was such a beautiful encapsulation of so many of the themes of it that i just wanted to share that question obviously removing the listeners identifying details so here's the question i have a difficult relationship with my mother and i'm currently taking a break from her i want to be able to have her in my life but i'm struggling to let go of the pain associated with past events how do you forgive someone who doesn't show much remorse how can i get to a point where her actions don't affect me as much i feel like each conversation with her takes me back to a bad emotional state from the past and it takes days for me to recover then critical question how do you determine if and how you should keep a close family member in your life cutting all ties with my mom feels like a loose lose staying also feels like a lose-lose and you might think for yourself if you're somebody who either is in or who has ever been in a situation like this if there are some notes there in that message that might resonate with you i know that even though i'm i'm fortunate to not be in that situation with a parent or really a situation with a family member more broadly nonetheless it's such a emotionally resonant kind of message and i was wondering if you had any thoughts about it dad it's very poignant it's also poignant to put yourself in the shoes of the parent here the older parent i want to toss the ball back to you for us in the sense that one of the key questions here is what do we owe other people what are our duties to other people and in the mix here is what duties do we have to an aging parent as adults ourselves who didn't really fulfill all their duties to us when we were a kid ranging from just mediocre to horribly abusive and it really is it's in there so i just wondered if you could talk about what you think about or how you think about the obligations including the obligation if you will or just the general principle of compassion even toward people that have harmed us or we disagree with maybe could kind of walk us through there a little bit i know you thought about this yeah so i definitely have some biases here um i think we both probably do to a degree mine probably derived from the fact that i'm a 34 year old person who doesn't have kids but i do have parents uh yours potentially derived from the fact that you have kids and you can kind of step into the parental role and be like wow what would that be like for me if uh if my kid separated themselves from me in this way so i just want to kind of give a quick shout out to those you know obvious biases of you here that being said a lot of my views on this are derived from my admittedly imperfect but at this point fairly well read knowledge of developmental psychology and the inherent power dynamic that exists between parents and children one way or the other a parent makes the choice to have a child a child does not make the choice to be born that's such an inherently obvious statement that we can kind of gloss right over it without really thinking about it deeply but children are the inheritors of their family system of their family history they are the inheritors in a lot of different ways genetically they're the inheritors of the parents genetics developmentally they're the inheritors of the parents behavior and that's a really important thing to emphasize here if you have an alcoholic parent and you are a young kid you are taking the stick for that parents choices on a day in and day out basis until you are at least 18 years of age wow that's a lot to put on a kid and i think that it is really fair to emphasize the overwhelming impact that parents have on shaping their children that children simply do not have on shaping their parents it's an imbalanced power dynamic and alongside that i think that it's very challenging to find a greater responsibility in this world than one that a parent has to their child again particularly a young child there's sort of a general principle philosophically that the more power we have in a situation the more responsibility we have to wield it appropriately this is where you insert your favorite spider-man quote of choice if you're into that sort of thing um so because of all of that a couple of different conclusions kind of come from it for me the first is that there is really no more like deeply moral responsibility in this life in my view than to be a good enough parent um the language of the good enough parent it comes from a guy named winnicott who did a lot of thinking about developmental psychology and about the impact that parents have on children the idea being that there is no such thing as a perfect parent there's just a good enough parent but i think that we all have an enormous responsibility if we take on parenthood to be a good enough parent and because of that a parent cleaning up their act in adulthood in the child's adulthood doesn't always make up for what happened back then in fact it often doesn't and i am profoundly sympathetic to people who are in that child position who say look i just you know i i can't be in this family system anymore this family system is unhealthy it brings unhealthy tendencies out of me i don't like myself when i'm around it i've made a thousand pitches to my parents to change in meaningful ways i've told them to go to therapy they won't go i've told them to stop drinking they won't stop drinking um they sort of make a nod towards changing their behavior twice a year they'll really cry and sob and beg my forgiveness and then just be right back to it the next day i i have a very difficult time marshalling a lot of um or maybe to put this a different way i have a lot of time having sympathy for the pain that the parent experiences if the child like chooses to cut them off in that moment and i also think that the child is entirely within their rights to do so so that's my kind of framing on the way that i think about this territory broadly um and hopefully there was something in there that people found useful because that was kind of a whole spiel well i'm really glad you offered that spiel and in this podcast sometimes we find ourselves talking about things that we've talked about before this is territory that you and i have never talked about before with each other about and so i'm hearing of newly really your own view about it i would say that if i could just kind of offer my own notions we're talking about a multi-faceted situation different facets i think the facets you named are all entirely true and i'm going to maybe talk about some other facets they don't reduce the validity of the facets that you've named they just kind of add to the complexity i guess of the range of human experiences so first of all i totally want to endorse the fundamental duty of the parents to the kid you inflict consciousness on unsuspecting flesh you owe it a lot 100 all in there i just want to kind of mark some distinctions and some complexities one is to make a distinction between the behavior of parents while the kids are young during childhood 0 to 18 let's say okay and then i just want to distinguish that whatever happened during that period of time with between whatever's happened since then in particular with regard to the willingness or not of the parents to respond to the desires of their kids to acknowledge fault to engage repair to be willing to act differently in certain kinds of ways as a precondition for seeing your grandchildren or having thanksgiving together i just want to draw that line there if we're talking narrowly and strictly about what is okay morally and this is a judgment call entirely what is okay for an adult kid to do an adult child to do with regard to their parents based on what the parents did when during their childhood is it okay on your 19th birthday to say you know i never want to talk to you again because of x y and z what if you know when you were a kid your parent was really pretty neurotic over controlling critical invasive kind of borderline-y you know in terms of diffuse boundaries in your business a lot trying to draw you into being your therapist and just kind of drove you crazy a lot as a kid well on your 19th birthday are you quote unquote justified from cutting off contact with that parent and blocking their access let's say to their grandchildren to you for the rest of their life because of how they behaved when you were a kid i'm just adding a complication here another complication i want to add is the ways in which how parents behave in families is the result of a vast network of causes and conditions how they were raised themselves their economic situations their health the behavior of their partner whether they had a partner at all other things they were dealing with other siblings sometimes that are in the mix who were special needs in some ways that drew the parents attention in i'm just tossing in complexities uh that that affect and highly influence you know how how a kid is affected and then also in the unfolding of our childhood we're really typically highly affected by our peer relationships of various kinds or relationships with others outside the quote-unquote nuclear family and yet often we tend to attribute fault to our parents because they're kind of local and clear when in fact a lot of other factors were really in the mix as well for ourselves so i'm just kind of offering this not in any way shape or form to let the parents off the hook for what's genuinely problematic but just to kind of sketch some other facets uh in the situation yeah i think that it's natural to like you were saying kind of localized responsibility to the parents for a wide variety of things that are going on inside of the family system that the parents themselves might be to an extent a prison or two at the same time sometimes somebody finds distance whether it's a parent a child a sibling or whatever because what they need is distance from the family system and the parent essentially becomes collateral damage in that equation and that's what needs to happen because the family system is unhealthy the family system is abusive the family system is problematic the family system is bad for that person's mental health and maybe it's not entirely the parent's fault but i think that it's just the way it is sometimes because the system is unhealthy and i i think that there's a distinction to be drawn here between blame like who gets the blame and what we're actually doing over here in this kind of other category and a lot of the time in estrangement situations and we want to be very careful about talking about like how frequently a or b happens or specific cases or whatever but i'm just drawing from the few examples that exist among my friend group of situations where things like this have happened that i've sort of interacted with personally a lot of the time there actually isn't blame sometimes there's a lot of blame but a lot of the time there's actually an appreciation for all of the factors you named the ways in which the circumstances were not an ideal wow the parents really went through these hard things in their own life you know they just didn't know better and yet at the same time you eventually come to a point of choice you come to a point of choice of whether or not you want to continue to engage in an unhealthy system for whatever reason and this is circumstances that we're going to just like make the assumption the system is somewhat unhealthy just for the sake of easier where you're choosing to engage in an unhealthy system out of a sense of duty out of a sense of obligation out of a desire to maintain simplicity out of a desire to connect with other members of that system who you like for whatever reason you're choosing to do that or you're choosing to find distance from that system and your parents are going to be the um the flag carrier for that system but they're not the whole system of often the problem is the system not the individual and i think that's just kind of an important thing to highlight here that's an excellent nuance for us and really helpful and i think one of the things that really take away it's so complicated and some things are just complicated for example when you were young your mom and i distanced from my parents because my mom in particular would not stop giving us unwanted advice so we decreased our contact uh we distanced we didn't break it off it was painful for her but we felt it was really necessary and it was also a case in which we asked repeatedly you know for a change of behavior and she didn't really budge although there were other times even before it all happened where we weren't really able to articulate what was uncomfortable but we just started distancing in a way i know that was painful for her and i kind of wish retrospectively i'd been better at using my tools and using my words and talking with her about it so i can relate i want to be clear i can relate to this the two situations that i think really stand out again and again as types of situations are are one like the situation that the questioner brings up which maybe we could talk about next where you know you're you're you really are trying to get uncle bob or mom sue to change and they just won't shift they won't acknowledge the past and they won't change in the present and you're grappling with that and you're sorting out what am i entitled to do what feels right to do how to deal with this even if sometimes for example you feel you have the right to reduce that contact even to zero deep down inside yourself there's often still fair amount of unfinished business about it that and grieving and loss and gosh i wish you were different and you get a funny feeling in your belly every time you think about it even though you feel clear and justified in your stance so that's one category the other category that i've definitely observed routinely of and i've experienced it is you're rolling along you kind of think everything's basically okay maybe you get a funny feeling a little bit but there's nothing particularly overt and suddenly this relative of yours this kid this parent this stepmother this cousin just cuts you off and they they won't talk with you about it you're not even sure what happened or maybe they tell third parties this exaggerated account of what happened that you know is just not factually true what and you know how to deal with that so just to name both of those has pretty typical kind of situations i think where there's a lot of suffering involved to return to it i'd again difficult relationship with mom would like to have her in my life but i'm struggling to let go of some past things how do you forgive somebody who doesn't show remorse that was a line in the question that i really want to focus on part of what we're talking about when we're talking about the situation that you were describing dad where you know that something is problematic there's something that somebody else is doing that is causing you harm causing you bother you've told them to not do it and they continue to do it for whatever reason to me any kind of full reconciliation with somebody else in adulthood requires a complete apology that's that is the a number one first step it requires admitting what happened it requires being deeply honest about it it requires apologizing for it and then it requires very very critically a commitment to functional change a lot of the time people apologize but there's no actual functional change and what really matters is functional change in the nature of the relationship and the problematic behavior in whatever is creating the problem for you but there's another kind of forgiveness that we talk about in the book resilient it's right behind me if you're watching on video which is this idea of disentangled forgiveness or what i've kind of taken to calling functional forgiveness which is a form of forgiveness that you extend on your behalf rather than on the behalf of the other person it often uh includes a shrinking of the relationship between you and the other person and just like you were saying dad you kind of going look i understand that right now my mom is causing problems inside of my primary system of relationship because of the way in which she is interacting with that system me and my wife are trying to raise this kid my mom's being a real pain okay we're gonna kind of exclude her from that process so that way you can kind of shave off the sorts of things that cause friction between you and the other person maybe you just stop talking about politics with a relative and every time that they try to engage you about politics you commit to smiling and nodding and essentially not responding you know and of course situations vary a lot here and there are situations where i certainly wouldn't be doing that but okay if there are little things where i can go yeah uncle bob whatever maybe pruning that out of your relationship makes having any relationship at all functional so that's the first thing that i would ask like are there things that you could shrink from your relationship with your mom that would enable it to improve in dramatic ways when i think about the particular question and it's a common situation in a sense we're balancing duty to other duty to self so to just kind of walk it through you could think to yourself in a situation like the questioner brings up or in other type situations what is what do i owe this other person and then you decide for yourself maybe you believe as as i believe for myself that in a broad sense i want i don't know if it the right word is duty but we have a principle of compassion to live by that's unconditional there could well be compassion for the parent of an adult child all right while at the same time feeling entirely all right with separating from that person because it's just so harmful for you or your own family system to be with that person so i can kind of get that also sometimes what happens is that we're dealing with people who are relatives and we look at them and we realize they're never going to change they're never going to change and then based on not so much even our compassion for them or our duty to them what kind of relationship do we want to have with them for all kinds of complicated reasons based on our own priorities and our own agenda maybe for the sake of our children who are really young and are not really affected by how neurotic and i don't know whatever how annoying our parent is it doesn't really matter because the kid's two three years old and grandma's really sweet she brings presents it's not a big deal so maybe we say to ourselves i'm just going to kind of ignore all these things i know about my mother the grandmother of my children and i'm going to enable an ongoing kind of contact and i'm going to keep an eye on as long as it's good for my kids so i'm going to make that choice which is along the lines of what you're saying kind of shrinking the relationship but focusing in a particular area but the point i'm trying to underline here is the way into this is your own priorities your own purposes how you're setting it up in ways that are good toward your ends you're setting up the relationship with your own parent as a means to ants that you personally care about including in my example here uh the benefits for for your own children for example to raise another dimension of this in what i'll think of as marginal situations situations where there isn't overt abuse by one party or another we're in that kind of more funky gray zone where the parent has been very imperfect maybe even problematic but for whatever reason you want to perpetuate a relationship with them or you want to be kind of on the side of the relationship i think that clear communication is a huge part of it being very clear and very open about the ways in which the problematic behavior is problematic the ways in which that behavior is problematic for you specifically and what needs to change in order for you to maintain a relationship with this person those conversations are almost universally unfun and are often enormously challenging uh in my personal experience that is a conversation that happens frequently in these normal range situations it's actually very obvious to all parties what the problematic behavior is and the ways in which it needs to change for the relationship to continue but i think that if we're approaching this from a moral dimension of what's your responsibility you move so cleanly into full morality for whatever choices you make after the warning if you give warnings there's no question anymore about whether or not you are kind of entitled to do what you say you're going to do because both parties have made their choice a clear communication has delivered been delivered the other party has chosen not to receive it and well now you're at choice about it and it can be an extremely painful extremely uncomfortable choice but you've done your duty so i think that that's kind of a dimension to name here that we haven't really spoken about uh directly to this point i think it's a great point and yeah i've known clinically many many situations where the adult child says to their parent this or that you know i i don't like x i would really want you to start doing why and their parent just brushes them off they can't believe it they don't want to admit it they don't take it seriously and it's very frustrating and finally sometimes you need to do things like not come home for christmas or not invite them to the wedding for the point to be really communicated and then maybe sometimes after that shot across the bow there there is a big wake-up call there's a big wake-up call that can sometimes happen that can really lead to a very beautiful kind of reconciliation i'm not saying it happens in the majority of cases in my own experience but it can possibly happen on the one hand on the other hand boy i just want to name situations that i've been very aware of where as a parent of an now adult kid in their 20s or 30s you can just know that that kid who's an adult now has a bucket of grievances toward you or a variety of ways that they close their heart to you based on all kinds of things and now as a as a parent of someone who's an adult ah it just pains you a lot to feel that they're unreachable and they have no interest in repair and yeah it's the right of that adult kid to do whatever they do they have the right all right and maybe to some extent they're quote-unquote justified in that but one thing that i've been just very aware of is the impact on uh parents of behavior of their adult children and kind of to summarize and simplify a lot of stuff i think that as you know as a aging parent of an adult kid your adult kids matter more to you than you matter to them and you just have to live with that fact that's really just kind of natural they matter to you a lot and when you're that adult child of an aging parent no one option and one i tend to encourage is to just take into account uh the ways in which you really do matter to that aging parent typically not always maybe but typically and to take that into account you know in your dealings with them yeah i think that this kind of segues naturally into um the second common question that we receive about this topic this is probably the most common one that we get actually and it goes something like this i'm a parent and my child has removed themselves from interactions with me i know that i made mistakes when they were younger i feel really bad about it and i've done my best to make up for it but my kid doesn't want to see me anymore what can i do so to me there are already some key components in this question that might not be the case in every situation there's the admission of an error there have been attempts at an apology at least according to the person asking the question the degree of mistake that's alluded to in the question is actually quite relevant here uh were you the good enough parent were you doing the best you could in a tough situation aware of the familial structures that were creating problems around you aware of your own history that yes made your behavior imperfect but at least made you aware of it were you looking out for your child and making the most of it or were you physically abusing them which by the way includes corporal punishment with some regularity were you um drunk every weekend were you you know what i mean like there are different kinds of mistake or error that a parent can make that can have radically different impacts on the long-term relationship between parent and child at the same time getting bogged down in arguments about what happened is almost never useful and particularly i want to highlight something really important here if somebody says that something was traumatic for them believe them take them at their word if that includes a painful admission on your part if that includes a painful acceptance on your part well that's kind of a part of it if it requires that you see the world through a different lens then you are currently seeing it well that can be a part of that like we cannot educate for another person what constitutes traumatic and in my very limited experience with these kinds of situations people often get bogged down in that as opposed to simply moving into responsibility taking and okay what do i need to do now i want to acknowledge the ways in which this feels like a different episode than our usual in the carefulness that we're both using to walk through this and i guess i just want to say for the record i don't think you and i have unfinished business between us that we're tiptoeing around i think yeah walking carefully and delicately there's so much truth to what you say on the one hand on the other hand huh facts really do matter you know for example of a parent so i like like an aging parent you know the let's say denies the fact that they were three seats to the wind uh most at most dinner times and definitely in the bag by you know 10 o'clock at night drunk if they're just not willing to cop to that fact which was observed by multiple people factually well that's a real issue because facts really matter right uh it's also true sometimes that where the wheels really tend to come off in families is in the teen years and having been a teenager myself having raised two teenagers and also having worked with a lot of families to be frank uh neurologically the teen brain there's this disconnect between the maturation of its emotional systems the intensity of emotion and desire in that adolescent brain gets kind of a turbo charge while the executive functions of the brain are still you know trucking along at roughly a fifth grade level you know and then it takes a while for those um you know executive systems to come online and sort of match the intensity now of the emotional engine that's been that's good that's gone from a beat up old toyota corolla to a roaring ferrari and there's situations where that 13 year old kid can interpret events a certain way or have a really intense reaction to something boom and then just swerve make a sharp left turn from that parent which then sets the course of their relationship for the next 30 years and maybe there were things that that 13 year old didn't understand about the situation that the parent was exercising authority in yeah or why the parent had that intense reaction you know when the school called yeah so at the end of the question there's that very poignant line my kid doesn't want to see me anymore and there could be a lot of different reasons that a kid doesn't want to see a parent anymore we can't really parse all of the different situations we can't parse all of the blame in terms of who's responsible for what maybe some of those situations include a teenager just for whatever reason gets sucked into the river of a problematic life path that ends with them removing themselves from their extended family it could also include a situation where frankly the parent was profoundly problematic in a variety of different ways doesn't fully recognize the extent to which they were profoundly problematic and now their kid has distanced themselves from them regardless of the situation that parent is also a human with human emotions and it's painful to have your kid not want to see you anymore and then there's that question at the end what can i do and i think that what can i do has kind of two aspects to it the first aspect is how could somebody go about attempting to reconnect with somebody who is estranged from them and the second question which i think is personally i think is kind of the more important one and certainly the simpler one for us to talk about is what can that person do inside their own mind to deal with the grief and loss associated with that estrangement and this really applies on both sides of it right this applies to estranged parents this applies to estranged children estranged siblings whatever else that grief and loss is frequently present it's a really good setup and to name one more complication on the way into talking about how a person could practice with it themselves there's also often the role of third parties for example in a divorce scenario in which they're two parents they have a child they separate the divorce and in the process of that divorce for various reasons that child becomes closer to one parent than another parent and maybe in the process of that sometimes the parent they got close to does little things to turbocharge the estrangement of the child from the other parent and part of what's in the mix is you feel mistreated by even betrayed by other adults including potentially your former spouse you know in the larger system and that can kind of get in the mix as well so i'm just kind of naming that i think a place to start is good old-fashioned be with the experience you got to start by bearing the unbearable as our guest joanne kacchitori wonderful wonderful guest titles her book bearing the unbearable where she focuses on the loss of children and other kinds of deep deep loss but more broadly here i'm talking about dealing with in the traditional metaphor the first art of life it hurts it hurts you're cut off you want to connect you feel helpless you feel shamed in some ways may well feel there's an injustice here whatever it might be these reactions are arising in you they're painful they're suffering so i think it's important to start there holding the root you know how it feels in spacious awareness bringing compassion to yourself bringing tenderness to yourself recognizing the common humanity of your situation it's it's easy to feel that you're uniquely bad you must be uniquely horrible for your son or daughter to cut off contact with you when in fact this is very normal it's very common you may well have been bad in some ways that said it's also a common humanity here so i think that's the first place to start just in terms of um just feeling it being with it and being okay about it so there are two sides to this right there's were you the cutoff er or were you the cut off e and there's often pain associated with both experiences and i think that it's really important to emphasize that right because it's very natural for us to attach to the pain experienced by somebody who was cut off but just as frequently there is pain in the person doing the cutting off regardless of how problematic your parent or child was there is still often because we are deeply social animals with millions of years of evolutionary history that goes into us wanting to just love and be deeply committed to this primary attachment figure you still have this part of you where you're like you know crap i still love this person yeah i hate them but i still love that yeah what do you do with that like that is an incredibly challenging experience for somebody to be going through um so this dynamic exists on both sides of it right for sure another way into the the kind of acceptance part of this maybe a little bit as you're saying being with it the human experience common humanity is acceptance that painful things happen in life and i don't mean to kind of demean it by just bringing it down to that level but it's true painful feelings happen in life sometimes we cause those painful things sometimes we don't either way they're painful and we need to move into an acceptance of what is because if we're just constantly expending our energy raging against the river of what happened we're never going to be able to move on we're never going to be able to come to peace inside of ourselves so i think that for some people there is an absolute place for acceptance of the current state of affairs that they have not fully accepted yet maybe that means accepting that you're that your kid's never going to want to talk to you again i don't mean to be kind of brisk about it but maybe that maybe that is what it is and it's only by entering the acceptance phase that we can move in to any other psychologically useful phase but it but it starts with acceptance you know that's a very acceptance and commitment therapy act kind of approach but still i just think it's deeply true for most of the experiences that we have yeah and one of the things we're accepting on in in either type of situation is a block to the natural flow of love and including a situation where let's say you're the one who is distancing from your parent part of the pain of that sometimes is a wish to have a healthy mutual relationship in which there can be a flow of your natural love and it's poignant and sad that you can't do that with that person because of the way they keep on acting they keep driving you crazy understandably flip the other way if you're the older parent of an adult child there too you want to have a natural flow of love and relatedness and it's it can't go anywhere right it has nowhere to go there's there's a primary kind of suffering in that so for sure that's true i could add a few things if you like from what i've seen about let's say if you're in the position where someone has distanced from you more than you would like and they're let's say unwilling to repair let's say that's the case what are some of the things you can do i do think it's helpful as long as you're not chasing minutia and ruminating and rehashing to really take a hard searing look at all that you did on your side of the street that was problematic that they're that your adult child is reacting to and to find that middle place where you're not denying or minimizing your own conduct including not just what your intent was but the impact on your child unwitting even even the impact of well-intended behaviors they still had impact on the child so to really do as they say i think in aaa a fearless in searching inventory for your own sake to come to peace with it so you're not minimizing minimizing or denying on the one side on the other hand you're not overstating it you're not just assuming that you must have been horrible you're really piercing into what was it you did and come to a feeling of responsibility about it i think that that's hard work but really helpful and that's definitely been true for me in certain situations try to try to face that while also recognizing you know your helplessness the limits of your influence to realize there's so much that's just out of your control that uh and that the reactions of the other person may well be out of proportion to what you did at least as you would understand it it's a lot of factors in this world that you don't have control over alongside the things that you really were responsible for so that kind of reflection which can often take months if not years to work through you might find yourself working through it at a deeper and deeper level over time but that kind of real open-hearted uh fearless and searching inventory i find it's actually a real factor in liberation and becoming freed up around uh what happened your heart may still be heavy there still may be that first dart every time you think about it or when the holidays roll around or the birthday rolls around of that person you wish it would be appropriate to send a card to but it's not or your birthday rolls around and you know you're not going to get a card or an email or a good wish okay maybe your heart's still heavy about that but in general because you've gone through through this dynamic of taking responsibility and also seeing the bigger picture you feel you don't feel burdened by it you're not ruminating about it you're not so weighed by down by it all as you go through your days and if i could offer it a third thing that i've seen work and has worked for me too if you're in a situation in which someone has separated from you and you wish they hadn't is to look for other real relationships in your life today that can fill some of that hole so you may be in a situation where you just say to yourself today my cousin my sister my son has cut off for me i wish they hadn't i've taken responsibility i've really tried to repair but it's out of my hands at this point where else can i find family where else can i find my true brother my true sister where else can i find an adult child someone that i can give to where else can i find young kids who are my grandchildren of construction not my grandchildren of blood and it's not to somehow lie about the loss over here on the one hand it's to be pragmatic about looking for ways to forge relationships that give you that family feeling that is available to you here and now going forward in your life yeah now i think that can be a great way to get some of the resources that you might not be getting right now from your family of origin um and it's also pertinent to people who are trying to find distance not so much to find a surrogate parent but to look for the kinds of relationships that they can build in their life through which they might be getting those familial resources and actually a more psychologically healthy way than the way that they would be doing it through their actual family of origin which is something that comes up very frequently there are two parts of this that we've talked about a little bit but we haven't talked about in detail we're getting kind of toward the end of our conversation here so i don't want to spend too much time with either of them but the first question is when you're a person who's in a position where you're beginning to think wow i might need to find some separation from my parent child friend brother whatever it might be and then the second circumstance is somebody has separated from me i really want to reconcile with them what can i do to make that go as well as possible understanding that they of course still have all the agency in terms of deciding whether or not we have distance ultimately and those two circumstances track very neatly to the first question we got how do i choose whether or not to keep my mother in my life and the second question we got my kid is taking all the space from me oh my god what can i do um and so i would like to spend just a little bit of time talking about those two different circumstances how does that sound to you dad sounds great good distinction great okay so for the first one maybe again because i've kind of taken like the distancer role throughout this uh throughout this conversation i might as well stick with it i i think that the first question is a really important one which is how does it feel to be around this person how does it feel on a day-to-day basis do you leave every interaction feeling worse than you started in it even if you love them and that is a huge indicator right off the top uh the second big question is how willing are they to take responsibility for what they did particularly again avoiding a lot of the complexities around oh i thought they did this but they really did that their intention was this but the consequence were that no no we cut through it what are you pretty darn sure actually happened what were its real consequences on you and are they willing to take responsibility for those real consequences and if they're not again that's a really big indicator maybe finally attached to this and this is something that i kind of wish we had spent even more time talking about is the person that you're distancing yourself from willing to make sacrifices inside of the broader family system to keep you around and i actually think that this is a hugely important part of the whole thing often as we were saying right at the beginning the parents are the figureheads for an unhealthy family system it's not just the parents fault it's the cousin's fault and the uncle's fault and the odds fault and the second stepmother's fault these very chaotic family systems is the parent willing to go you know what little timmy i love you and my relationship with you more than i love and care about my relationship with these other people and therefore i want to have an individual relationship with you and you don't have to come to christmas anymore but i would really love it if the day after christmas i was able to go over to your condo and we could just hang out together maybe that's accessible for that person in a way in which that big family system is not accessible because it is fundamentally unhealthy and if the person isn't willing to check these three boxes basically make basic interactions pleasant take full reasonable responsibility and then change behavior around what happened and do what they can to improve the broader family structure or at least make it so you don't have to interact with it if they're willing to do those things i think that you've got a good basis for continuing some kind of relationship with them if they're not wow it makes it really hard that's all deeply wise and i want to name another complication which has to do a lot with culture i mean you and i come out of western culture american culture yeah late 20th century early 21st century i've had interactions with people for example when you were young in school settings these were parents of of kids that you knew and the parents were born in india and they came to america some time ago and and i found myself asking them so what's it like for you here and her comment was it's terrible there's no sense of family there's very little relationship people don't connect with each other it's like you're all just strangers ants passing in space i was really taken aback i thought oh wait we live in a fairly you know middle class upper middle class suburban environment it's pretty sweet people are nice like wow this is horrible and yet for them it truly was for them it truly truly was so you and i are talking here about kind of a waiting on family and obligations and generational obligations that are very culturally situated and i just kind of want to name that we're talking about it in a hyper individualistic kind of western culture way of saying it that's actually anomalous over the course of human history you think about it certainly anomalous uh in hunter-gatherer bands so just kind of naming that part yeah and and some of that is born from changing obligations over time to different groups like if we're talking about this in the 18th century the the family was literally all that you had often all that you had in terms of your place of work where you derived your food from we think about ranch environments from not that long ago like the situation that my grandfather your father was born into you don't really have the choice of taking a lot of separation from a problematic family structure you're just kind of there and the nearest family is 20 miles away we live in a very different situation these days yeah so in terms of deciding whether you're justified or what to do let's say in terms of reducing contact distancing even cutting off your own aging parent maybe i thought the way you walked through that forest was extremely useful really really useful yeah thank you one thing i would just like to flag once i bring in the other side of it on the one hand if the aging parent were in my office i would say do whatever you need to do short of sticking an ice pick in your ear to keep your daughter happy to keep your son happy to because they have the power uh they matter much more to you than you matter to them at this point uh do whatever you need to do unless it just seems incredibly egregious absolutely i've given that advice multiple times and by the way i'm going to try to keep that advice myself you know if you bring a little list to me including on behalf sometimes what happens is you know on behalf of you know your partner let's say uh or your kids or something like that okay on the one hand on the other hand i've also known situations where i would ask my client so what bugs you about your mom like what's the big deal like what really bugs you or why are you why have you cut her off for the last couple years and they'll say well honestly she has this habit of chewing with her mouth open in restaurants and it's embarrassing and it drives me crazy and i'm like really now i'm a therapist i'm supposed to stay neutral basically and not be you know take sides like oh what bothers you so much yeah totally yeah yeah yeah i mean there are irrational things kind of along those lines and they just you know without getting into what's justified or unjustified was right or wrong just pure pragmatic interest to realize you know if you cut off contact in a family system with an aging parent that can have a lifetime of consequences it can be consequential when that parent dies uh it can have impacts on broader systems you know it's consequential so just really take that into account when you're ready to make these big steps yeah these are big decisions and i think that most of the people who are listening to this are not making them trivially so maybe from the other side of it then coming from the perspective of the person who is being distanced from are there things that they can do you think to engage this process as you know well consciously skillfully as possible in terms of attempting to reconcile or repair or achieve forgiveness from the other person take maximum personal responsibility yourself be careful yourself on poo pooing the complaints of the kids in your view it might seem like such a small thing that they don't want to do christmas in a particular way or they're less religious maybe than you are or they you know really want you to not interact with their spouse or their parent their parents-in-law from their spouse's side um in a particular kind of way and internally you think to yourself really is that that big a deal well guess what for them it really is that big a deal and you know they matter more to you than you matter to them so it's in your best interest to walk on those eggshells if you think they're just eggshells and keep the peace i would say that i would say also if someone has cut off contact from you i think it's really helpful to stay out of justifying yourself which is i think of course been very much your own counsel here and to really try to understand in the steve stephen covey seven habits of highly effective people uh which i definitely recommend one of them is seek to understand before seeking to be understood really try to understand what in the world is going on and cop to it to the maximum possible extent to really bend over backwards and third if you do make agreements keep the agreements keep the darn agreement if you agree not to drink at the holidays if someone puts the world's best champagne in front of you don't touch it you know keep the agreement if the parents never want you to use certain kind of words or to give a gendered kind of toy to the kids don't do it do exactly what they want you to do if you make that agreement absolutely keep it the last thing i'll say is that sometimes it's helpful to write a letter or maybe try to send some kind of olive branch or communication through a third party someone who's an intermediary if you are going to put something in writing be really thoughtful about what's in writing potentially being used against you or taken out of context the last thing i'll just say is to realize that in this life so many weird things can happen it's a long long long life and to just accept the fact that in this life certain dishes are going to come your way want to rewind this whole interaction which is an unusual conversation you know tonally even there's kind of this background of mourning in in the vibe there's a kind of grieving here and and also an aggrievedness yeah yeah and i i think it's part of what makes this whole territory so challenging to talk about there's such a range of situations there's such a range of kinds of grievance and levels of grievance um sometimes people are separated from who totally deserve it sometimes people are separated from who may or may not deserve it like maybe they just got dealt a bad hand and it's not really their fault and they did the best they could but they really did do something that legitimately hurt somebody else on the other hand maybe the person who's acquiring separation is just being profoundly self-centered and not caring about the emotions and situations and experiences of other people just as the parent has overwhelming power over the young child man as people age particularly as they really age you start moving into health situations you start moving to low mobility the child has an enormous amount of power over the parent also generally in terms of dictating when people see each other because most of the time as you were saying you want to see them more than they want to see you and and i mean i'm grateful that that's like not our dynamic i really love seeing you guys unfortunately i live close enough that that's an easy thing for me to do but that is often the case and when we have these big power imbalances and maybe this is just kind of my closing thought here our responsibilities change and maybe there's a moment where there is a lot of water under that bridge and there were a lot of legitimately bad things that happened inside of that relationship but somebody just has kind of a moment of grace where they go you know what i want to put a bow on this relationship in a way that allows for a certain degree of healing and forgiveness to take place and i think that that's really beautiful and really legitimate when it does happen and at the same time i think man sometimes you got to know when situations are unhealthy for you and you got to see it clearly you got to be like look i might deeply love this person but every time i leave that house i feel worse about myself than when i entered it and that's enormously consequential that is enormously consequential for a person's life and to me our greatest responsibility is to ourselves it is to looking out for our own health and happiness and well-being and the health and happiness of well-being of the people we spend the most time around sometimes that's your parents sometimes it's not and i think a lot of this is just about clear seeing in terms of what you feel is the honorable and moral action to take it's poignant in part because as a parent most parents are not sociopathic abusers of their children yeah for sure and so there you are as a parent you're dealing with a whole bunch of complexities yourself and you've got this kid nobody trained you to become a parent there you are the village it takes to raise the child's a ghost town so it's really on you and this kid is someone you'd make enormous emotional investments in enormous and then they grow up and they grow apart for you and they walk away and they take and you're still invested in them but you know they're not invested in you it's super poignant there's a you could say almost a tragic view that inherently parenting is a tragic undertaking in some senses you really deeply invest in your kids and then you're incredibly vulnerable to what they decide to do about that ever after especially these days and in which the traditional family system the extended family or environments where people usually lived and died within 100 miles of their birthplace so they maintained ongoing relationships typically with their family now relationships are matters of choice not of circumstance and routinely they're situations where the kid is a thousand miles away or more from the parent and what do you do then yeah no i mean one of the things that i heard said about estrangement issues is that often the most challenging type of grief to interact with is the grief for those who are still living because there is this feeling of the phantom presence around the table the person you've distanced yourself from the person who's distanced themselves from you and you feel that presence in a different kind of way when you know that they're still somewhere out there and yet they are beyond reaching for whatever reason either because you chose that for yourself because you think that that's what's truly healthy or because they don't want to interact with you anymore and man that is a very challenging kind of grief to reconcile because it is one that doesn't have a clean completion attached to it i think that we could spend probably another six hours talking about this and going through all the nuances and forms and styles and interactions and all that is such a deep and rich topic it's been a very interesting conversation today i think at least for both of us uh probably also navigating the natural dynamic between a parent and a child having this conversation thankfully one that does not have any of these overtones attached to it for which i am enormously grateful but just nonetheless those differences in perspective so i hope that if you made your way through the entire conversation today you found it useful today we focused on talking about estrangement situations we began today's episode by talking about the different kinds of estrangement that families might be experiencing in all estrangement situations there is a distancer and a distance e and in the circumstances that we mostly focused on we talked about a child distancer and a parental distance e in other words the child is looking for more distance from the parent of course that's not always the case there are plenty examples of parents distancing themselves appropriately or not from their children people choose to distance themselves from members of their family for a wide variety of reasons and it's very challenging for us to cover all of the different circumstances and conditions that might come up and throughout the conversation we tried to stay away from situations where it was very clear one way or the other what a person should do or at the very least what a person is entitled to do morally if we're talking about circumstances of abuse in my view you can do whatever you want morally if you choose to distance yourself from your parent wow more power to you they were abusive they were deeply problematic then there are situations for one reason or another where a kid makes a selfish decision where they head down a problematic path in life as a teenager things really go sideways for them the parents try to intervene the kid resists that intervention and then bam they're 19 years old they're out of there they never interact with the parents again even though the parents were perfectly good enough we're not excessively controlling and we're just trying to do right by the child the dynamic inside of estrangement situations is often complicated by and attached to the power dynamic that exists between parents and children when children are young parents have enormous power my personal view is that there's probably no greater moral obligation than the obligation that a parent has to a young child you influence that child in so many ways that affect the course of their life and critically that child does not make the choice to be born to those parents or to be born into that broader family system they are entirely innocent and yet they are the inheritors of that often damaged family structure and as they age they might see more clearly the ways in which that structure is damaged the ways in which that by interacting with that structure their life is cheapened and then you get to a choice do you stay inside of the structure out of a sense of moral obligation to your family of origin some sense of the nuclear family and the responsibility that kids have to their parents and so on or do you look out for yourself and distance yourself do you understand the system is unhealthy and that you will over time be made more unhealthy by it but then over time the dynamic shifts and the child frequently finds themselves with more power over the parent than the parent has over them and in those situations again because you have more power my personal view is that we tend to begin to have more responsibility as well to try to navigate these situations in more granular ways we focused on two kinds of case studies two questions from listeners one from the perspective of a child trying to find some distance from a parent and going through the whole process of figuring out what to do how much distance to have and whether or not they should fully separate themselves then the second question was from a parent whose child had separated themselves from them they tried to make amends they'd tried to reach out to the child and apologize for what had been done and yet there was nothing to do the child would not accept their apology and continued the separation there was a lot of nuance inside of this conversation but there were a few points that we made over and over again the first was that ultimately it's your choice whether to forgive somebody else you can't make someone forgive you but sometimes you recognize that you can't come to a full forgiveness for someone else but you want to have a functional relationship with them for whatever reason maybe it's because you want to stay in contact with your siblings maybe you really like your uncle ted maybe you just kind of take a pragmatic view and you go look i want to have an inheritance one day whatever your reason for it you want to have a functional relationship with this other person and that's where what we like to call disentangled forgiveness comes in disentangled forgiveness often includes the other person not making a full apology you're just trying to get to a place where you can almost forgive them on your behalf rather than on their behalf it's a place where you can let things go and you can begin to hold the relationship inside of yourself in a way that allows you to have some separation from it you don't feel as entangled in it you're not worried about whether or not they'll one day apologize for what they did you're taking it where it is and you're going you know what i still want to be functional with this other human inside of yourself that might involve a real clarity that what they did was profoundly messed up and you would never do it to somebody else it might involve never having a certain kind of conversation or a certain kind of interaction or being around them in a certain kind of circumstance ever again and you might be perfectly clear about that inside of yourself another thing that we emphasize is the importance of responsibility taking if you're in a position where somebody distanced themselves from you take to whatever extent possible full and complete responsibility for what you did and then critically it's not so much about the apology it's about the way in which the behavior then changes in many kinds of estrangement situations what happens is there is this long cycle of one person saying to another i need you to change in these ways or saying to them here are the ways in which you hurt me i need you to take responsibility for that and then i need you to change in these ways and the person gives a tearful apology they promise that it'll be different in the future and then the future comes around and nothing actually changing one of the things that rick mentioned is that sometimes parents take kind of an unfair amount of stick from their children for the problems inside of the larger family system i then responded to this by emphasizing that often what's happening when a child is distancing themselves from a parent is that they're distancing themselves from the family system as a whole if the parent is a part of a broader family system that the child finds painful to be a part of challenging to be around traumatic to be involved in wow then you have a choice to make are you going to continue to be a part of the broader family system or are you going to choose to connect to your relationship with your child we then talked for a little while about how to make the often extremely painful choice to separate yourself from elements of your family and i emphasized three key points the first is to really pay attention to how it feels to be around people maybe you've found some distance in small ways and you find that these painful patterns you used to have these patterns of harmful or negative behavior are really improving and then you go back into interaction with your family system and man all of the negative behaviors just come right back if you find that every time you go home for the holidays you feel worse at the end of it than you started well that's an indicator that maybe you shouldn't be going home for the holidays second really pay attention to how willing the other person is to repair how willing they are to accept responsibility for what they did and how willing they are to change in meaningful ways then finally pay attention to the broader family system and that power structure that has emerged if the person you're considering separating from has a greater allegiance to maintaining the structure in the family system that's problematic than they do to you and your health and well-being that's a real red flag right there rick also spoke for a while very poignantly about coming to terms with grief and loss moving into acceptance appreciating the reality of what is and he closed with this really beautiful point that often these situations are made just a little bit easier if you can still find a place in your heart where you have compassion for the other person maybe you don't love them anymore maybe you don't even like them maybe you're totally clear that what they did was abusive and deeply problematic but nonetheless alongside that if you can hold just a little bit of compassion for them it often makes the separation that you find from them much easier this was to be transparent a really challenging conversation not just because i'm a child and rick is my dad but because it is such a nuanced and fraught one with so many different little complexities that can emerge into so many of the different little situations you might run into here we really can't speak to every possible circumstance that can emerge but we did our best to cover what we could and i hope that you found it useful if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe through the platform of your choice maybe even leave a rating and a positive review and hey you could tell a friend about it it's one of the best ways we have to reach new people also if you'd like to support the podcast in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and have a great week

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 24,826

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, mental health, mind, brain, psychologist, being well, being, well, rick hanson, psychological, therapy, mindful, compassion, confident, confidence, anxiety, anger, intimacy, intimate, forgive, forgiveness, family, trauma, rick, hanson, self-help, self, help, relationships, relationship, love, fear, most important, most important skills, key skills, estrangement, estranged

Id: N9YGABOCwH8

Length: 80min 22sec (4822 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021